Subset regular expression substitution

[Keary Suska]

on 2/13/02 5:00 PM, ningersoll at cso.atmel.com purportedly said:

> I have a string which may, or may not, have parenthesis somewhere in
> the first 10 characters.  The string is always longer than 10
> characters.  I want to substitute space for either "(" or ")" or
> both.   Because that part of the string which beyond the tenth character is
> descriptive text, I dare not change any parenthesis after the first 10
> characters.  I understand the regex {$x =~ s/\(|\)/ /g;} matches any and
> all occurrences of either the '(' or ')' characters and replaces any '(' or
> ')' with a space.
> 
> The issue is, can I force the substitution, "s/\(|\)/ /g", to only work
> over the first 10 characters of $x rather than all characters?  Is this
> possible in a regex?   If not, I can always sub-string wing it.
> 
> Your thoughts will be appreciated!

TIMTOWTDI, of course. If brevity is what you want, you could use:

    $text =~ s|^(.{10})|do{ $str = $1; $str =~ s/[()]/ /g; $str }|e;

Anything dissimilar would require multiple steps.

Keary Suska
Esoteritech, Inc.
"Leveraging Open Source for a better Internet"